Polygon Completes Hard Fork to Reduce Gas Fee Spikes, Disruptive Reorgs
The software upgrade to the Ethereum-scaling project went live on Tuesday and included two proposals from December that Polygon validator teams voted to approve.
Jan 17, 2023 at 4:42 p.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/4PNTUJLY5VHX3CLZHLOGJXCYLE.jpg)
(Matt Popovich/Unsplash, modified by CoinDesk)
Polygon, an Ethereum-scaling project, successfully completed a hard fork designed to reduce instances of spiking gas fees and disruptive chain reorganizations known as "reorgs."
The software upgrade occurred at 10:45 UTC (5:45 a.m. ET) on Tuesday, according to a tweet from Polygon Labs, the lead company behind the project.
The two proposals included in the hard fork were put forth in December. Some 87% of Polygon validator teams that participated voted for approval. Only 15 validator teams took part in the voting process, which is extremely low given the number of active validators at a time is limited to 100.
The first proposal adjusted a mechanism that sets gas fees – a kind of tax one pays in order to transact on a blockchain. The new mechanism aims to keep gas prices low when there is a lot of activity on the network.
The second proposal aims to reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a data block – part of an effort to prevent frequent reorgs, which occur when a validator node receives information that temporarily creates a new version of the blockchain.
The price of Polygon’s native token, MATIC, is up nearly 15% over the last seven days – in keeping with a broad rally in digital-asset markets.
Read more: Polygon’s Blockchain to Undergo Hard Fork
UPDATE (Jan 17 17:25 UTC): Adds that only 15 validator teams took part in the voting process.
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Margaux Nijkerk reports on the Ethereum protocol and L2s. A graduate of Johns Hopkins and Emory universities, she has a masters in International Affairs & Economics. She holds a small amount of ETH and other altcoins.
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